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The cast of Dispatch has been rightly praised by fans and the media. It includes Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, The Batman’s Jeffrey Wright, and, of course, multiple Critical Role cast members. But it is Flambae, the brash, fire-wielding member of the Z-Team, that has the biggest development in the game. A lot of that has to do with the character’s writing, but AdHoc Studio also thinks their voice actor brought the secret sauce that made the character work.

“You know, when you cast an actor that brings such a specific voice to the character, which maybe didn’t exist when you’re drawing the concept art originally,” Dennis Lenart told us when we interviewed him and Nick Herman from AdHoc Studio. “[Flambae] went through a few revisions of his look anyway, but yeah, that’s a thing where it’s like, I can’t imagine having that specific voice [in mind] and then trying to find someone that had that would probably result in failure. It’s one of those where you just have to find the person that just brings something really interesting to it and then just let them do their thing.”

The development of Flambae was in the writing, and the Dispatch devs always knew he had more to him than when we first saw him, but they don’t think Flambae works with anyone else behind the mic. “Lance [Canstopolis’] performance is definitely one of the things that comes to mind,” Nick Herman added. “Where I mean, he was basically like a jerk, jock, bully, you know, bad guy. On the page, it was funny, but it was a little more, initially, generic, as far as the voice would be concerned, and then once Pierre [Shorette] brought up… he was showing Dennis and I clips of Lance performing and I mean, it was such a sort of whiplash of, like, well, yeah, this is so different than anything we’ve been thinking. And also, we had scratch recorded, so we had been hearing the character a certain way. But it was so undeniably entertaining and funny that we were like, ‘All right. Let’s try.’ And so we brought Lance in, and he did his thing, and it was immediately obvious that we should have this in our comedy game.”

AdHoc Studio was carefully watching the fanbase for their reaction to Flambae because they knew it would change over time. It took a few episodes before he found his audience. “I know how funny Flambae is,” Herman insisted. “And I'm entertained by him, but people were not until, kind of, a certain point in the season. People were like, ‘This guy sucks. I hate him. Get him off my team. Can I cut him?’ Like, because he's the bully, that's all they can see, and, like Robert, it sort of takes exposure to him. It takes a little bit of growth. Episode five happens, and things kind of, like, thaw, and you start to see that he's just this weird dude who maybe has a set of issues that you need to kind of look past to see the real person.”

It was the karaoke scene where fans started to warm to Flambae. If you’ve played Dispatch, you know exactly which one we’re talking about. The one where he calls Robert a bitch in about a hundred different ways. That’s the moment when people figured out that Flambae is an antagonistic jerk, but he is their antagonistic jerk. “So that was cool to see because that’s where they start to align with how I feel about Flambae from day one, because I know the whole thing, you know?” Herman said. “You know the whole thing. So that was a cool, cool one. It’s a really interesting character to sort of watch everyone’s journey with.”

Coninue to the story with our deep dive into Dispatch with a conversation with AdHoc Studios' two main developers. If you're still confused after that, here's the Dispatch season 1 ending explained and how they changed it at the last minute.